


Tape and Glue

by queensimmons



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5x12, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Female Friendship, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jemma Simmons Needs a Hug, Motherhood, Panic Attacks, Team as Family, call it a kid fic if you want, greys anatomy references if you squint, her friends are great, written before 5x13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 09:20:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13995222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queensimmons/pseuds/queensimmons
Summary: “When the ground gives way and your world collapses, maybe you just need to have faith. And trust that you can survive this. Maybe you just need to hold on tight. And no matter what, don't let go.”A kilt, warm tea, a book.Sorrow, strength, a family.





	Tape and Glue

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing in a long while and I really wanted to get it out before the episode so, sorry for the weird formatting. Probably one of my favorite things to write. Enjoy

At first, it’s her instinct is to laugh.  
  
It’s funny, ironic even. He had been in front of their faces their whole time. The way he pinched his nose when he was thinking, the way his eyes were so blue she could get lost in them, his beard and his will to help people and large appetite is so incredibly Fitz, so she laughs.  
  
The team turns it into a joke for the next week.  
  
_“Look at the way he stands, that’s all Fitz!”_  
  
_“He won’t even let Daisy get a word out, Jemma’s written all over it!”_  
  
Really though, it’s a contest to see who gets annoyed first.  
  
  
(Fitz does, Deke follows.)  
  
  
Jemma’s sitting upstairs next to Daisy and watches as her friend types away on the computer.

 

“You should forgive him you know, he did have to live a really different life over there.”

 

“I know, I know,” Daisy grumbled. “It’s just he sold me out and it’s not like I’m mad or anything, I just don’t trust him. Even if he is your love child’s, love child, or whatever.”

 

“It is a rather awkward situation, isn’t it?” Jemma questions. The answer floats around above her in the air.

 

“He did get me a nice ring, though.”

 

Daisy spins around and takes Jemma’s hand in hers, she twists it around, brown eyes absorbing every detail of every diamond. “He got it at a pawn shop.” She shrugs. The musical sound of Jemma’s laugh fills the room.

 

“You don’t deny it’s a nice ring.” she smiles. Daisy does too.

 

“No, I don’t.”

 

“I would’ve killed to see Fitz in a kilt though, probably would’ve plasted images all over the walls.”

Jemma chuckled. “Me too.”

 

After her statement however, the air in the room begins to thicken and the mood drops a smidge.

 

“I can’t believe we were at the bottom of the ocean.” she sighs, never taking her eyes off the rock on her finger. “And on different planets and in different timelines.” Her last words are sad and wither off until they slowly disappear. The clacking of the keyboard stops and Daisy turns her chair to face Jemma.

 

“The ceremony was beautiful, Jemma.”

 

“I know but it was just a ceremony, and so much is happening right now I just-”

 

“Hey, love is sacrifice right? You gotta get through some shit to get to the good shit.” Another chuckle, this time from both of them. Jemma looks up at Daisy and though they are looking at each other, Daisy doesn’t meet her eyes. She looks miles away, focused on living through a different time and place. “Lincoln wanted a wedding, the idea of a white picket fence life was so amusing to him.” she lets out a small, meek laugh.

 

“Oh Daisy, I’m sorry I didn’t mean to-”

 

“No it’s okay,” Daisy assures her. “Maybe we just weren’t meant to be together and besides, your wedding or ceremony or whatever you want to call it makes me believe in love again so thanks, for that I guess.” They smile at each other and more clacking of the keyboard fills the air.

 

“Do you think you only get one?” Daisy asks, drawing Jemma’s attention.

 

“One what? True love?”

 

More clacking.

 

Jemma thinks back to the ocean and to the galaxies, she remembers the stars and the distances, the fighting and clawing her way back all for one person. She wonders if it is even possible to go through such terrible things for any love that isn’t Fitz.

 

(She would, and one of them is sitting in front of her.)

 

“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “Or I hope not at least, otherwise every vibe coming from May and Coulson is all in my head.”

 

Daisy presses enter and leans back in her chair.

 

“Yeah, you might be right about that.”

 

The girls continued to talk about the past and the future, daydreaming almost, about a happy life. One where no one is running, one where there isn’t a graveyard of ghost haunting eachothers eyes. The conversation ends back on the wedding though because quite frankly, Jemma has been _glowing_ since she’s said ‘I do’. It's the happiest Daisy has ever seen her.

 

And Jemma deserves it, she knows. They all know.

  
Then, there's a loud thud and the sound of crashing objects echoing down the hall. They both turn to face each other, a bit of worry across their faces. Daisy reaches for her gun but Jemma stops her, placing her delicate hand on top of Daisy’s and smiles.  
  
  
“Probably nothing,” she says, confident . “I’ll go see.”  
  
  
Daisy doesn’t remember the last time she’s seen Jemma happy, genuinely smiling and just _optimistic_ .  
  
  
She wonders what it was that broke her friend, the unbearable weight of ocean on her shoulders or the withering rope that held the team together tearing with each pull of distance between them.  
  
  
Daisy wonders if she was too busy piecing herself back together that she forgot to hand Jemma the tape so she can be put back together too.  
  
  
Daisy’s eyes look towards the ring so perfectly placed on Jemma’s finger and the smile she missed seeing upon her lips.  
  
  
“You be careful.” Daisy says.

  
Daisy wonders if happy is contagious, she wonders does Jemma finally have enough happy that it will make her believe in happy endings again.  
  
  
(She think she does. )  
  
  
Jemma walks down the hall and into the supply closet. It’s dark and unsettling. The sound of abandoned cans rolling against the cement fills the air as Jemma turns the corner.  
  
  
She hears a faint voice far from her, it’s light and airy, as if every word is meant to have a laugh trail after. Jemma slowly draws her gun from behind her and cautiously walks.  
  
  
“Hello?” she calls out. The voice grows a little bit louder. “Anyone down here?”.  
  
  
Then, there’s another voice. Also light, but rough and aching.  
  
  
“Deke?” Jemma calls. She turns the corner and raises her gun. He’s standing across the room, arms limp and eyes fixed, focused. He speaks again, voice husky and heavy as if he’s choking on an ocean of words. He doesn’t look at Jemma, may not even hear her. She calls again.  
  
  
_“Deke,”_  
  
  
Jemma steps into the room a little more and gets a little closer to the man. He, in return, takes a step forward. There’s the sound of the light, airy voice again. Jemma reaches to put a hand on his shoulder but then she turns, suddenly, sharply, to see what he’s looking at.  
  
  
In front of her stands a girl, a woman, not much taller than herself. Her hair was long and wild, hazelnut curls floated in the world next to her, untamed, unbothered. Her eyes a light shade of sparkling blue, skin pasty with rosy pinched cheeks. A constellation of freckles covers her face. She is beautiful, almost enough to distract anyone from the ghost of a life that hides underneath.  
  
The woman turns to face Jemma as she enters the room, but the scientist only takes a glance and keeps her attention focused on Deke.  
  
“Deke you need to step away,” she warns. “Come on, we need to go.”  
  
He doesn’t move.  
  
“Deke.”  
  
Her voice grows anxious, irritated even. She’s about 2 seconds from just shaking his shoulder, she wants to yell in his face to snap out of it, to yell in his face and tell him just how dangerous and stubborn he’s being and needs to go.  
  
(The sound of Daisy’s voice in the back of her mind yells, “That’s all Simmons.” In a different reality, Jemma would laugh. )  
  
But before she can yell and before she can grab his shoulder, the woman speaks.  
  
“I missed you.” She cries. “Look how beautiful you’ve grown.”  
  
Jemma freezes. She lowers her gun and turns her head, locking eyes with the woman standing before her.  
  
She’s seen this before. She’s met those eyes before.  
  
Deke is talking, murmuring about something, maybe he’s even yelling but it doesn’t matter. Jemma can’t hear him. She becomes so intensely transfixed, unable to move, unable to breathe. It’s something there, in the light airy voice, there’s something there. The way her lips part when she speaks, how the word beautiful rolls off her tongue. The breath of relief, of air that escapes from the back of her throat when she finishes her sentence. It’s so, undeniably Fitz. It’s so obviously Jemma.  
  
It hurts. A piece of Jemma falls to the floor. Maybe it’s just another shard of her heart.  
  
Jemma shakes her head. She can’t, it can’t be.  
  
“Go away, I don’t want to shoot you.” The fierceness in her voice cuts the air.  
  
_You’re an agent, you’re an agent._  
  
The woman looks to face Jemma and smiles a crooked, lopsided smile. She walks forward, Jemma thinks that she’s moving, she thinks that she’s stepping away.  
  
_You’re an agent, you’re an agent._  
  
Icy cold palms connect with her face from an arms distance away. The woman smiles again, this time excitedly and wraps her arms around Jemma.  
  
She doesn’t move.  
  
The lady pulls back and wipes a tear from her cheeks.  
  
My cheeks, Jemma thinks.  
  
“Mama,” she breathes. “Mother, it’s you.”  
  
Jemma can only watch as the woman pulls back and looks into her eyes.  
  
(The same eyes, Fitz’s eyes.)  
  
Instinctually, Jemma brings a hand to her stomach, a tear she didn’t know she was holding falls.  
  
“You look just like me,” the other woman smiles. “You look just like the pictures.”

* * *

Jemma isn’t sure how she got out of there. She isn’t sure if the sound of gunfire was actually the painful palpitations of her heart, she doesn’t know if the yelling was the wailing of an abandoned baby, she isn’t sure if the puff of dust before her eyes was actually the death of her, the death of _happy._ She thinks maybe her soul disappeared when that cloud of smoke did.  
  
And maybe it did.  
  
The jokes aren’t funny anymore.  
  
She holds it together for a few more days, she knows if she talks about it she’ll break.  
  
Tape and glue isn’t enough this time.  
  
No one knows what happened down there, maybe they never will. Fitz wants to help, he wants to be there and share her pain.  
  
He doesn’t push her to talk about it.  
  
He hears her crying one night in their bed as he tries to fall asleep. He stays still for a moment and contemplates whether or not to say something. He knows how she is when she’s upset. He thinks he’s made up his mind, then, the wretched sound of distressed sobbing rips from her throat.  
  
_“One breath, but there’s two of us?”_  
  
He grabs her shoulders and sits her up, gently and silently pulling her into him. She cries in his arms as he smooths her hair and kisses it. He doesn’t say anything, he just holds her. She never wants to let go. His arms calm her, they bring her comfort.  
  
But her heart will need more than stitches this time.

* * *

Her first instinct is to laugh.

 

It has to be a joke, it has to be a sick, cruel joke. So sick and twisted it’s _funny._

 

Her footsteps echo off the walls of the corridor, thumping rapidly and increasing with the quickened pulse of her beating heart. Someone is screaming, no, crying.

 

It’s loud and confused and familiar and _hurt_ , like the sound of a broken vase hitting dark wooden floors on a summer night, the zing of a dying lightbulb, two people with one breathe at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Jemma runs faster.

 

The faster she runs, and the closer she gets, the shrieking sounds of a siren slowly meld into the sound of the deadline a payphone. The cry grows desperate, a crumpled note, a windy night, a different galaxy.

 

She turns the corner.

 

And there, in a woven walnut basket with a quilted white blanket, lay a small baby. Wailing and whimpering desperately for attention. Jemma walks in a looks down at it, she analyzes her rosey freckled cheeks and wispy curly hair. Jemma kneels down and lifts her from the carriage, snuggling the baby into her arms and cooing her until she calms. Eventually, the weeping stops and crystal blue eyes are staring back at her. In the fist of the baby, she releases a ring, a silver ring, with a simple delicate design with single beautiful diamond in the center.

 

Tears spring to her eyes and she feels her breaths growing shallow. Her hazel eyes dart across the room frantically and her chest fills with a thousand pounds of sand. Her hands violently shake as her eyes drown in salty tears. The baby begins crying again, screaming even, and she doesn’t know what to do.

 

May and Coulson rush into the room, weapons drawn, ready to take down another creation of the fear dimension. Instead, they’re met with a baby, silent and confused.

 

Jemma doesn’t realize it’s her screaming.

 

They try to talk to her like a child, they lower their voices and move slowly. They speak softly as if she's a wild animal, as if she had just spent 6 months on another world unable to tell the difference between real and not real, they treat her as if she might break.

 

(But won’t she though? The tape is one sided, afterall.)

 

Somehow, the baby ends up in Coulson arms and out of the room. She’s still screaming, she’s still crying, her lungs still burn.

 

May is there. May doesn’t speak to her like a frightened child. Her voice is sharp, tone and intentions warm.

 

“Simmons, look _at_ me.”

 

She’s still shaking and raspy when she collects herself together. “I can’t… I can’t…” she tries to breathe. Jemma falls to her knees and sniffles her sobs.

 

“I can’t do this May, I can’t do _this.”_

 

“You can.”

 

“I can’t protect her,” Jemma cries. “I couldn’t even hold her I can’t protect her.” Jemma slams her head into May’s shoulder. She’s taken aback, but only for a moment before she begins smoothing the girls hair.

 

_“Do you think we can change it? The future?”_

_“Every move we make changes the future. The real cost? We’d be changing the past.”_

 

It’s not fair May thinks. For anyone to be robbed of such a thing so beautiful. May would know, motherhood is the most beautiful gift anyone could receive.

 

“You will protect her. With everything in you, you will protect her.”

 

Jemma’s hiccups slow. “How do you handle it?” she asks, voice small. “Knowing you’re powerless to help, how do you handle it?”

 

May wipes the tears from Jemma’s cheeks.

 

_I don’t know_

“There is no prophecy in any universe where you fail Jemma. You will not fail.”

 

They stay on the floor for a while. Jemma tells her she can leave, she tells her that she’s fine now and apologizes for wasting her time. May nods and goes.

 

She comes back with two cups of Earl Grey.

 

Jemma thinks she’s convinced the others that she’s fine by the end of the week.  
  
(Though she has hardly convinced herself)

 

Coulson collapses in the room. Everyone was in the middle of a debate, Deke leaned against a wall in the corner as May and Daisy stood next to Coulson, who were engaging in a seemingly serious disagreement. Jemma sat in the swivel chair next to Fitz , his hand on her shoulder, occasionally giving his thoughts on the matter. Jemma, miles away, sat in the room silently playing with the ring on her finger.  
  
Suddenly, there's the sound of coughing and choking, yelling and pleading. A force causes her shoulders to shake, someone's yelling her name, she thinks. A figure falls to the floor and people begin moving quickly.

 

_“Oh how I’ve missed you”_

 

“Simmons, we need help over here!”

 

_“Papa always talked about you, he always told me stories.”_

 

“Simmons, Coulson is down!”

 

Then, there was a face in front of hers.

 

“Hey, hey Jemma, Jemma we need you now, okay?” A gentle voice, an urgent one. In a daze, Jemma stood and was quickly brought over to Coulson’s side.

 

_“I kept a picture of you in my locket, see? All I ever wanted to do was hear your voice. Papa says I’m so much like you, or at least, I used to be”_

 

Jemma doesn’t know how she manages to save Coulson. She’s still underwater, all sound and noise indistinguishable. She moves slowly, too slow, or at least that’s what it feels like. She thinks she talking, people seem to move as soon as her mouth does so maybe she is.

 

She’s trapped, she realizes this hastily. Her hands begin to feel tingly and head dizzy, ice courses through her veins and she feels suffocated and hot all over, she can’t _breathe._

 

_“Why would you make me do this, you’re my best friend in the world?”_

 

Her vision turns black and spotty and it feels as though she’s entered a tunnel. She pushes herself off the ground, fingernails scraping against the floor.

 

_“I want the sun!”_

 

She stands, hands shaky, pins and needles piercing her feet, and runs. She runs, and runs and doesn’t quite know where she’s running to, or who she’s running from.

 

_You can’t hide from yourself, Jemma._

 

She enters a room and slams the door behind her. She begins clawing at her chest with tears running down her face. _I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe._

 

To which, a small voice responds, _but you have to._

 

She swallows hard and closes her eyes. In and out, in and out.

 

“ ¡Jesús Jemma, me asustaste!”

 

Jemma picks her head up and sees Elena laying in the bed, pale and literally in pieces yet, smiling.

 

However, her smile disappears when she notices her friend’s blotchy cheeks and tear stained hands. The sound of Jemma’s heavy breathing drowns out the steady beeping of the monitors. Immediately, Elena’s eyebrows furrow and she speaks, her voice laced with concern.

 

“¿Qué pasa Jemma? What’s wrong?”

 

Her first instinct is to laugh.

 

Jemma’s eyes glance around the room, at the monitors, at the medicine, at the bandages. Elena’s bandages. Her first instinct is to laugh at the irony, to laugh at the fact that this other woman, this shell of the once strong, independent, fierceless other woman, who has lost everything, still asks if she’s okay. Jemma does laugh, just a little, and shakes her head afterwards.

 

“I should be asking you that.” she jokes, walking over towards the monitors.

 

Elena gives her a small, sad smile.

 

“You know, when I was a kid. My cousin had a dog, a pitbull. He and I loved that pitbull. Eventually, he got sick and my family was going through rough times at the time, so I didn’t see my cousin often. It was months until I found out the dog was dead, _muerto_. I didn’t know what I would do, that dog got me through everything. My grades started slipping and I fell. I felt I couldn’t talk to mi primo about it because he had his own issues,” she stops to look at Jemma, who’s turned her attention to reading more charts.

 

“He was going through tough times too, but once I started talking to him, I didn’t feel like I was falling anymore. And it turns out, he felt the same way. We helped each other, Jemma. That’s what families do.”

 

The scientist didn’t face her. She continued to flip mindlessly through the packets of paper. Slowly though, the sound of paper against paper stopped and Jemma sighed.

 

“What was the dog's name?” she asked. Elena laughed behind her.

 

“Bleu. We called her Bleu.”

 

Longer minutes went by and they both sat in comfortable silence, Jemma with the charts and Elena resting her eyes.

 

“I’m pregnant,” Jemma admits. Ruffling sheets fill the noise behind her. “I’m pregnant, I’ve already met my grandson, and daughter, and I don’t know how to tell Fitz and honestly I’m a bit overwhelmed.”

 

Slowly, Jemma turns around to face her friend, who sits in the bed, eyebrows furrowed and lips pursued in concentration. Elena looks up at Jemma with a smirk.

 

“So you talk to ghosts?”

 

A pause. A brief, tense pause, and then laugher. Musical hiccups spill from Jemma’s throat and her laugh is so incredibly _happy_ that Elena begins to laugh too.

 

“Yeah, something like that.” she tittered. “Something like that.”

 

Later that night, Jemma, Yo-yo, Daisy, and May all gather in Elena’s medical room, laying across the floor and sitting in the chairs, flipping through old baby books and scrolling through parenting websites.

 

“I am _not_ naming my daughter Agatha, Daisy.”

 

“Oh come on, she was my favorite nun! “

 

“It’s not that bad actually, you know. I went to school with a girl named Agatha. She dumped frijoles on my new shoes once in front of my crush. _Perra loca.”_

 

“As if I’m taking advice from someone who agrees to name their cat Ethel.”

 

“Yeah. May I can’t believe Andrew let you do that, that’s almost as bad as my birth name.”

 

“In my defense, it was a _really_ ugly cat.”

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta-ed with probably many typos. Sorry.
> 
> queensimmons on tumblr


End file.
